Bonmot

I do think Tom Tiddler has a point. We should be gathering data more intensively. Climate modeling is not a substitute for hard data.

For instance, I would dearly like to know more about trends in subsurface marine temperatures at the poles. That would provide a better indication of what is happening than the rather shonky global average temperatures we generally use.

The trouble is that data gathering is expensive and budgets constrained.

As it happens I came across this interesting piece in the NY Times. It illustrates how our ability to gather data is degrading.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/science/earth/14ice.html

Tom Tiddler (again)

Re replicating greenhouse effect in the lab.

Professor David Archer at U Chicago has his physics students doing lab experiments to illustrate the greenhouse effect. That's how routine this has become. We've moved on since Arrhenius.

Just to be clear, the experiments are NOT intended to "prove" AGW but to demonstrate the physical principle underlying the global greenhouse effect.

To all:

Once you accept that the greenhouse effect is real - and there's no doubt about that - then you have to ask yourself what happens when you increase the atmospheric concentration of the second most important of the greenhouse gases.

So what do you guys think happens?

Stephen - a belated comment.. a better article than most as you actually show some understanding of how the climate models work. Congratulations. However, you say that the physics says that there is a feeback effect from water vapour.
Sorry, but that's an assumption. It was an assumption built into the first model which has been repeated in all the others. Whether it is happening or not is strongly debated. The degree of feedback has been subject to claim and counterclaim, but I'm not aware of any argument that directly supports it and there is some evidnece that water vapour in the upper reaches of the atmosphere is just not foillowing script.

Steve, thanks - but does Professor David Archer at U Chicago do his lab experiments to illustrate the greenhouse effect with just 390 ppm?

You added: "Once you accept that the greenhouse effect is real - and there's no doubt about that..."

Really? the issue is by how much the effect is real, for it can be very true but of trivial quantitative significance. That is what my regressions paper shows. Email me and I send it to you.

You went on "then you have to ask yourself what happens when you increase the atmospheric concentration of the second most important of the greenhouse gases". My regression paper answers: nothing much, and certainly NOTHING of statistical significance. Water vapour totally overwhelms [CO2].

You end "So what do you guys think happens?"

Business as usual, and no climate change, of which there has been none that is measurable since 1900 over 110 years, but lots of decadal variability up and down. There is NO evidence GMT has been higher 2000-2010 than it was in 1900-1910 as the instrumental record for the latter covered less than 20% of the globe and excluded virtually the whole of Africa (except Cairo and your Cape Town), most of Central America, and nearly all of SE Asia. All those regions are hot, so the recorded GMT for 1900-1910 is grossly understated. Bring them in and the Gistemp rise in GMT of 0.7 oC for 1900 to 2000 disappears.

Email me (tcurtin at bigblue.net.au) and I will send you NOAA/NCDC maps of the coverage.

Steven-
If you read the report of the scientific enquiry you could confirm that "trick" was used in the sense of "ingenious procedure", not in the sense of "deceitful massaging". It was a private conversation between familiars, the context of which was entirely ignored by those who promoted the story of misbehaviour. I'm surprised you're not willing to look further and reconsider. The conclusion remains that no published work was affected by *alleged* misbehaviour.

I'm also surprised you make excuses for fossil fuel companies. Of course I *understand* why they behave the way they do. That doesn't change the gross irresponsibility of their behaviour.

Clownfish-
As I noted, the fall back here is the grand conspiracy. Do you also worry about ExxonMobil's very much greater vested interest and their deliberate and well-documented disinformation campaign?

You didn't make clear which of the three investigating panels you were referring to in your various comments. It's true not all of them looked at the science.

There were two questions addressed - (1) was the science fudged and (2) was information withheld? These are distinct questions. There was some question raised about the legality of withholding information, but that doesn't at all imply the science was fudged. There has not been a tradition among scientists of automatically making public every last detail of their work at the scale demanded by some, and 20 years ago these scientists had no idea there would be an issue. Now they know better. FOI laws were made to cover political decision processes, and applying them to science is something new for which they are not necessarily appropriate. You can rage in indignation, but even if you had a reasonable case, which I don't think is the case, it still doesn't invalidate the published science.

Just because they might have been in breach of some rules made for politicians and bureaucrats does not make them evil, and automatically wrong in everything they have ever done. Except to diehards who are only interested in discrediting them by any means.

A statistician pointed out to the scientists that there were some better statistical tools available than the ones they had used. The scientists have acknowledged that and are using them. That is the normal process of science - people find better ways to do things.

If you want to quote "economists" you need to specify which ones. Mainstream free market economics is the most amazing collection of pseudo-science I've even come across - you can read my analysis at length in my book Economia http://betternature.wordpress.com/booksanddownloads/economia/ . The simple fact is that many dramatic energy efficiencies have been demonstrated in the real world. We just need to spread them around, we don't need fancy theory.

Geoff Davies: You are being seriously disingenuous when you say 'If you read the report of the scientific enquiry you could confirm that "trick" was used in the sense of "ingenious procedure", not in the sense of "deceitful massaging"'.

Mann, Bradley (well known plagiarist) and Hughes (1998) had claimed that their tree rings had disposed of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, so we had a hockey stick long handle until 1900, when suddenly a hockey stick short blade arose.

Problem arose when from 1960 the tree rings disclosed no blade. The trick was to replace the continuing tree ring handle with an instrumental (thermometer) blade.

If this was not intellectual dishonesty, what would be?

You cannot honestly use tree rings to dispose of the well-attested MWP 1000-1300 and then drop those tree rings when they fail to show warming after 1960.